RunCPM VS cpmhttpd

I happen to have an emulated CP/M 2.2 installation quick to hand to run old word processors, so let's take a look.

There are no doubt some systems still running under emulation doing the same thing as they were 40 years ago. But the truth is CP/M is dead. Long live CP/M!

It's just hobbyists now. One hacker ported his game to a Kaypro under CP/M a couple years ago: http://www.chrisfenton.com/dd9-kaypro-edition/

Much of the focus is on porting CP/M to whatever new or old Z80 system someone has built or found. I can't think of anything particularly dazzling besides the above, in terms of recent new programs, but here are some pointers if you wanted to write something yourself!

RunCPM is a CP/M Z80 virtual machine under modern OSes for development etc. https://github.com/MockbaTheBorg/RunCPM

CP/Mish is an attempt to bring all the free software CP/M tools together. It is to CP/M as Linux is to UNIX, or FreeDOS is to MS-DOS. A mostly complete, improved, libre reimplementation: https://github.com/davidgiven/cpmish

Also from David Given (and not CP/M specific) is Cowgol. Alpha quality. But it's a self-hosted Pascal/Ada-like language with compiler. Runs on 8-bit systems, at least theoretically. It is written, of course, entirely in Cowgol: https://github.com/davidgiven/cowgol

Millfork is a language which targets CP/M systems, among others. It's a whole-program optimizing compiler for a language somewhat lower level than C, with properties that make it very nice to compile for 8-bit systems like no recursion, and no automatic promotion to 16-bit integers in type handling: https://github.com/KarolS/millfork

SDCC supports the platform with C surprisingly well. I wouldn't call it rock-solid but compared to the above toys it is an industrial quality compiler for the Z80. In fact, C seems to be the most common actual language for hobbyist and the little remaining serious Z80 development, probably ahead of assembly.

If it just reads and writes the terminal and can fit in 64 KB, then a port is probably straightforward.

I wrote a web server for CP/M a couple of years ago: https://github.com/jes/cpmhttpd and https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/rc2014-web-server.htm...

Since CP/M has no networking support, this also includes implementing TCP/IP inside the web server program, although I only did an extremely superficial job of this: just enough to make it look like it works under normal circumstances. (For example, it has no mechanism to retransmit dropped packets, at least partly because because my machine has no RTC so it has no idea how much time is passing).

It connects to the Internet via SLIP over a serial port to a nearby Linux machine.

The machine that was running it briefly hosted a little web page about my RC2014 and the web server program, but it's too much hassle to keep it running, so it's not up at the moment.